Strange Days In Science #3: Attack of the Robot Vampire Bats

A few weeks ago, someone asked me if there was any paranormal story that I thought had enough evidence to be truly believable. Now, I’m still planning on writing up an article about my Greatest Unexplained Mysteries [Title Pending], but I’d like to toss the question over to you:

Are there any paranormal stories that you feel have enough evidence — not just anecdotal — to be truly believable? Something in which a rational explanation just doesn’t seem to fit at all? Let me know!

While you ponder that, let’s continue…

Strange Days In Science, Issue #3

This week we have yet another preview of what awaits us during the upcoming Robot Apocalypse. Its name is DALER, for Deployable Air Land Exploration Robot. Or, as everyone likes to call it, the Vampire Bat Robot.

This terrifying monstrosity of science, inspired by the common vampire bat, can walk and fly, ensuring that no human will ever escape its grasp. For now, however, its creator, Ludovic Daler, hopes DALER can be used to help “find victims in dangerous areas after a natural disaster.”

“The DALER can be remotely deployed to fly to an affected area, and then can walk through a disaster zone (e.g. a damaged building) to locate victims, meaning that human rescue teams can concentrate their efforts where they are needed, rather than using time to search for victims in a dangerous environment.”

New research suggests that chicks have a “number sense.” According to Live Science, “Scientists found that chicks seem to count upwards moving from left to right — they put smaller numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right, the same mental representation of the number line that humans use.”

Scientists are investigating a possible link between warming seas and a huge spike in sea slug populations. The sea slugs in question are the bright pink Okenia rosacea, but thankfully they don’t seem to produce ADAM.

A new theory suggests that “black holes do not exist where space and time do not exist.” And while you may be thinking, “Well, yeah,” what’s interesting about this theory is that, according to Phys.org, it involves a generalization of Einstein’s theory of gravity called “gravity’s rainbow,” in which “space does not exist below a certain minimum length, and time does not exist below a certain minimum time interval.”

A new study into the threat of gamma-ray bursts (GRB) has found “a 50% chance that a nearby GRB powerful enough to cause a major life extinction on the planet took place in the past 500 million years,” according to the CERN Courier. They’ve also estimated that gamma-ray bursts may be one of the answers to the Fermi paradox, as they may prevent “evolved life” from occurring in 90% of galaxies. Bummer.